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...version Kafka's novel. Its importance in relation to the more personal films lies in the link Haneke presumably wished to make between his own work and Kafka's--at which point I should say clearly that I find Haneke's work the more interesting and productive, the more directly relevant to the quandaries we all face today: Kafka's novels induce a sense of hopelessness, Haneke's films (although profoundly pessimistic) continue to demand change, if change is still possible. What connects the two artists is a sense of a terrible, perhaps unreachable, hence undefeatable power that ultimately hangs over our lives, controls and destroys us. Those unsympathetic to Haneke (and they are many, especially since Funny Games) might link his work to Kafka's under the general label of 'paranoia'. But there is a crucial difference: in Kafka the higher power remains mysterious, inexplicable; in Haneke it is subjected to scrutiny and analysis, unmasked, named. Kafka is paranoid; Haneke is realistic.
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The screenplay (realized by Paulus Manker) is another matter: The Moor's Head relates very closely to Haneke's concerns but is an altogether cruder, uglier, more simplified statement of them. It's possible (I don't know) that the screenplay was an earlier work, preceding his own films; or it's possible that Manker simplified and coarsened Haneke's vision. It differs from his own films in a number of ways: 1. It contains 'in your face 'physical horror (making it, at climactic moments, almost unwatchable); 2. It places a major burden of responsibility on the protagonist's wife (insensitive, incapable of understanding her husband's obsessions), whereas women in Haneke's films are shown to be at worst uneasily complicit (The Seventh Continent), and otherwise (Benny's Video) capable of beginning to extricate themselves from the dominant male discourse; 3. Its analysis of our predicament (if we really want to save the human race, or the planet, and defy Freud's universal death wish) is altogether too simple: ecology, although obviously of enormous importance, is not the only issue involved. Rather, the later films suggest that (as Jane Fonda asserts at the end of the Godard/Gorin Tout Va Bien) we must 'Change everything. But how? Everywhere, now.' Haneke, today, seems less optimistic about the possibility of this happening (but then so, today, does Godard).
The five films that Haneke has directed from his own screenplays fall neatly into two groups: the two multi-narrative films (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, Code Inconnu) and the three single-narrative films (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, Funny Games). This article is concerned with the second group (the only three films I have available on video for repeated viewings), but I want to preface it by making the obvious connections. Chance (unpredictable encounters, people happening to be in the same place at the same time) plays a major role in the two multi-narrative works, no more than a minor one in the other group (in Funny Games it is virtually eliminated by the film's dominant character, who not only dominates the others but controls the film itself), but it is not the films' inner concern. Rather, the two films examine (one might say mercilessly scrutinize) people's reactions and their effects: the consequences of the chances, the coincidences, would have been different if those involved had reacted differently: accidents happen, yes, but what counts is how you respond, how you deal with them, the words you speak, the gestures you make. Beyond this is the films' omnipresent awareness of the pressures of modern living that partially, perhaps predominantly, determine one's behavioural choices. Haneke seems to me at once among the cinema's sternest yet most compassionate moralists: the films steer a precarious course between blaming the individual and blaming the culture, between seeing the individual as capable of choice and seeing him/her as merely a helpless victim of 'the system' (which is always the system of advanced corporate capitalism in all its dehumanizing horror). It is this astonishingly poised and precise moral vision that connects the multi-narrative films to the three under discussion here: a trilogy of modern horror.
The complexity of Haneke's work can be suggested by admitting at once that different basic approaches to it (not merely different opinions of it) are possible and indeed necessary. Above all the films invite both a philosophical and a political approach: one might read them as attempts to explain human existence, or as passionate protests against the contemporary environment. I am not and have never been a philosopher: I seem to be incapable of abstract thought. My own approach to cinema remains in the widest sense political. Although there are many times nowadays when I find myself sharing Haneke's apparent despair about our world--times when the vastness and enormity of corporate capitalism, and now globalization, seem absolute, irreversible and (worst of all) non-transcendable--I feel compelled to clutch on to an increasingly improbable hope, without which I couldn't write or function, I could merely retreat into a private world of what are now largely lost traditions. And I must assume that Haneke feels the same: otherwise, how could he continue to make films? Even the heroes of Hawks's Rio Bravo (the most modern of films), who have nothing to motivate them except the necessity for self-respect, can maintain that self-respect only through committed actions.
All of Haneke's films except The Castle take as their starting-point our contemporary predicament: the desensitization and dehumanization of modern life lived beneath the monstrous umbrella of corporate capitalism. In the three films with which I am concerned here this takes different forms, is explored from different angles. The Seventh Continent examines (primarily) life within the 'business' world, taking as specific subject a family who appear notably successful (as the business world understands success), financially secure, with everything that capitalism tells us we need to be happy, who decide to commit joint suicide. Benny's Video takes as its primary concern 'noise': both the literal noise with which we are surrounded (or learn to surround ourselves) daily, and the metaphorical 'noise' of the environment, the sense of hurry, of the need for constant distraction, the feeling that every moment must be filled with some form of activity. In the background of both films is the sense of power and disempowerment, the feeling that we have somehow been deprived of individual choice, or that the only choice left us is so drastic as to be appalling. Funny Games (which I would agree is the most difficult of the films to understand and justify, impressive and indelible as it is) seems to isolate this theme, reducing it to an almost abstract, almost diagrammatic clarity: a study in naked power and total disempowerment, including the power, literally, over life or death. Taken as a trilogy, the films might be seen as exploring (philosophically but also practically) the question of valid and invalid power: power over oneself, one's actions, one's environment (i.e. awareness and self-knowledge, the very necessities of which Haneke's characters are deprived), versus the power central to contemporary culture, the power of money and technology, the power of the invisible controllers who ultimately own these but who are perhaps themselves enslaved by them, like robots creating other robots. Haneke is the most radical, and therefore the most necessary, of contemporary filmmakers.
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The Seventh Continent
The exposition of Haneke's first film demands detailed treatment. Masterly in its control, precision and intelligence, it lays the groundwork for all that follows, so that, while we can't predict what is to come (we are shown nothing except the 'normal' banalities of our daily lives), we accept the logic of the denouement, when it arrives, as somehow inescapable. The entire opening ten minutes is in fact a meticulous concrete realization of the concept of 'making the familiar strange', Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt. Camera movement (here and throughout the film) is minimal, a few slight reframings; the same is true of dialogue. Nothing is spelled out, we have to look beyond the seemingly banal images for their implications. There are very few point-of-view shots and when they occur they tend merely to confirm the blankness of the characters' lives. We are to study these people, not identify with them. We are also not on any account to despise them: Haneke doesn't. His camera looks at them, it doesn't look down on them, and we are to do the same.
We are introduced to the film's leading couple (in the credit sequence) by their car's number plate (L76 236) as it passes through an automatic carwash: the implication is that a number plate can identify them as well as anything. For the time being they are nameless: we learn much later that they are Georg and Anna. A series of close-ups (as the credits and the car continue on their journey) fragment the vehicle: back window (awash with soapy water so that we can't see inside), a wheel, the front window (occupants still invisible), then at last we are inside, viewing the couple (or more precisely the backs of their heads) from the rear seat. They are completely motionless, completely silent, not touching, no contact of any kind. The image suggests that they are being sucked into some monstrous, inexorable machine or process (the automatic movement of the car through the wash), without protest. Then increasing darkness into which they are swallowed. Then water down the windscreen, like a flood of tears. A sign tells them (in two languages) 'Nicht Bremsen! Do Not Brake': they must not take personal action, just allow themselves to be...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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